The Long Goodbye, Part Two

It seems appropriate that I end Delaware Currents where it began, at Delaware Water Gap. It’s been my Facebook cover photo for 10.5 years.

I’m feeling all the feels, and one of them is that I’m feeling sorry that the National Park Service took such a hit in the first days of the Trump administration from the crazy cuts that DOGE perpetrated on it and all of us in the hundreds of ways that the federal government touches our lives.

We are still counting the cost of those cuts, and the mentality that denigrates science and journalism. 

Here’s a powerful guest column from our friends at Stroud Water Research Center: When local news and science go dark, the river loses its voice.

Read the whole thing. Share it. Post it on your Facebook page. It’s a clarion call that demands our attention.

Of note is the last line: “Because the river will remain. The question is whether we will still hear what it’s telling us.”

It reminds me of a piece I read long before I became fascinated by this river of ours.

It’s from Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse:

I am only a ferryman and it is my task to take people across this river. I have taken thousands of people across and to all of them my river has been nothing but a hindrance on their journey. They have travelled for money and business, to weddings and on pilgrimages; the river has been in their way and the ferryman was there to take them quickly across the obstacle. However, amongst the thousands there have been a few, four of five, to whom the river was not an obstacle. They have heard its voice and listened to it, and the river has become holy to them, as it has to me. 

Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future. 

Thank you,

Meg